OG’s BLOG

If you like This American Life and The Signal, you should be listening to RadioLab. Producer Jad Abumrad’s playful (humourous? perhaps psycho?) style comes through the whole program, each episode a very listenable and entertaining meditation on Science. Co-host Robert Krulwich is ALWAYS entertaining, and even Neil DeGrasse Tyson pops in for comment here and there.

It comes on NPR from WNYC in New York, and is available as a Podcast.

“Radio Lab is designed for listeners who demand skepticism but appreciate wonder, who are curious about the world but who also want to be moved and surprised.” – From the website.

…and speaking of my novel, an agent contacted me and wants to have a look at it. I’m punching up the first 30 pages, which is all they’re interested in seeing at this point, and I’ll be doing some illustrations for the pitch. July is my month to get this all put together and ship shape.

Wish me luck…

WORD COUNT: 66,000

I don’t know why it should matter to me, but in my quest to write my book, I am almost endlessly fascinated with other books’ word counts. I think it has something to do with judging my progress against other books that have been successful. *shrug*

I used to go by anecdotal evidence. For instance, someone once told me that Harry Potter I had 75,000 words. I’ve been going by that barometer, figuring that for a popular kid’s book, it was safely over the 40,000 word limit where it gets dismissed as a novella, yet was safely under the 100,000 word limit where kids are scared of it. I’ve been aiming at 75K ever since, figuring that was somewhat of a golden mean.

Well. I no longer have to go by anecdotal evidence. Amazon, on books enabled with the Search Inside function, has a very useful link, almost buried in the book info: TEXT STATS.

See THIS ONE for Bridge to Terabithia. It tells you the 100 most used words in the book, and how the book ranks in terms of ease of readability, complexity, and number of text characters, words, and sentences.

I didn’t know this function was there, and I’m betting you didn’t either.

Just for fun, I thought I’d present a few books and their word counts here:

Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson: 33,000
Lord of the Rings trilogy, JRR Tolkien: 470,000
The Stand, Stephen King: 462,000
Charlotte’s Web, EB White: 31,000
A Series of Unfortunate Events: A Bad Beginning, Lemony Snickett: 24,000

Unfortunately, many books at Amazon do not yet have this Search Inside feature, so I’m still stuck with anecdotal info on Harry Number One. However, the stats come from the Harry Potter Lexicon, a fan-run treasure trove of information. Knowing fans, I imagine they hand-counted each word, so this is probably very accurate.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: 76,944

Looks like my novel’s on track to hit that mark as well.

WORD COUNT: 66,500

“It’s gonna pass well to the north,” Garry Prolix announced in such a way as to make sure everyone at swimming lessons understood that he was an Authority on the subject. “They said it was going to rain, really storm it up. But it’s going to pass to the north of us, just like the last one did.”

Garry sighed. He was a big man, big, and loud, with a face that was almost always red. This ruddy color didn’t come so much from sunburn, although he burned easily. And it didn’t come so much from overdoing the alchohol, although there were certainly gin blossoms on his fat cheeks and putty nose. No, the red in Garry’s face was the red born of almost continual disappointment with the rest of the world and a sort of frustration at not being taken seriously enough.

It was a burden being such a weather Authority, especially when people didn’t seem to recognize him as such. His expertise didn’t come from schooling, training, or vocation, but he held to the belief in his own expertise just the same. He was an Authority the way other men are Greek, or Short, or Fit. It was a fact, not to be disputed, inherent in the man. Inborn. He was a weather Authority, dammit, and if the only way to get the point across was to talk loudly in public places about the latest weather reports and how wrong they got it, these idiots who predict the weather, then talk about it he would.

Not that the weather was his only area of knowledge and proficiency. For instance, he had recently gone to Budapest, because his wife’s father lives there, and is slowly dying of some horrible disease. They don’t have proper hospitals in Hungary, Garry was quick add, nor proper medicine. But the old man was set on dying there, and if that backward Third World Medicine could hasten him on his way, so much the better.

Don’t even get him started about the adventure when they took their young son to Hungary and had to substitute Tylenol for Motrin because there was no Motrin in this backward little Third World ghetto the rest of the world called Budapest. Garry considers himself somewhat of an expert on The World, and a treasure trove of comments like this are The World brought to you by Garry, an American Report back from The Great Out There, presented for your enlightenment.

It is this very worldliness that lends even more authority to Garry’s weather expertise. Would you doubt his absolute mastery of any subject he offers to comment on? He’s been to Hungary, after all.

“Yup. Well to the north. No rain for us today, I’m afraid,” he said, finally. “Too bad, too. We could use it. It’s been dry, you know.”

On the way home from swimming lessons, it rained hard.

If you like This American Life, I think you’ll like The Signal, a production of our local Public Radio Station, WYPR.

This week is a fascinating story about local wiseguys, a real life Sopranos episode, the events of which spawned a novel – Wised Up. You can subscribe to The Signal in podcast form at iTUNES.

We here in Baltimore are facing a 50% rate hike on our energy bills, starting today.